Evaluation Plan Impact Analysis for "Healthy School"

Schools are an important setting for interventions to strengthen children's health. All children spend a significant amount of their time at school and interventions at school give all children, regardless of their social background, the same opportunities to benefit from them. In accordance with this, the state of Lower Austria has run the program, “Healthy School,” in middle schools through the initiative, “Tut gut!,” since 2007. The program follows the WHO approach of "Health Promoting Schools" and aims to create health-promoting framework conditions in schools in order to promote the health of students, faculty, and other stakeholders long term. As part of the program's evidence-based approach, the Centre for Evaluation actively works with the “Healthy School” team to develop a description of the causal mechanisms by which the program should achieve the desired results based on the best available knowledge. The program theory developed is the basis for a detailed, written draft of the intended impact analysis of the program. The project will be implemented with funding from the Lower Austrian Health and Social Fund (NÖGUS) from September 2019 to January 2020.